Looking for a Specter

While Looking for a Specter is clearly the work of a young author, the dark humor of the play is at times eerily mature. in the form of a puppet play filled with both familiar and unfamiliar fairy-tale figures, Hachenburg creates an allegorical world where the bones of the elderly are collected as raw material, Death is enslaved by a dictator, and questions of guilt and innocence are impossible to resolve. Today’s reader may be chilled by Hachenburg’s seeming foreknowledge of events in the death camps. Kotouč, however, does not believe that Hachenburg intended to suggest that such things could actually take place. He simply took the events he had already witnessed to their logical conclusion: the banalization of death to the point where the human body became just material for collection.